When she came out of the bathroom Pete was sitting at her dresser. He glanced at her - she noted uncomfortably that her towel barely covered her and that she was dripping water all over the floor - before returning his attention to her perfumes.
"What do you think you're doing?" she snapped.
"Couldn't find your sex toys, so …" He shrugged and pulled the stopper out of a bottle. After sniffing at it he put it to one side and said with the air of a connoisseur, "No, I don't think so. Flowery and light: just right for a summer day, but not the thing for a formal occasion where you want to impress."
"What. Are. You. Doing. In. My. Bedroom?"
"Avoiding an overdose of Cuddy. Your sister arrived."
Cuddy's heart skipped a beat. "You ran into Julia?"
"Not quite, although I'd love to meet your charming sister," he said with fake sincerity, batting his eyelashes. "Rachel greeted her volubly when she opened the door, so I was forewarned and opted for a strategic retreat into your bedroom."
"Why aren't you downstairs?"
"Kid was bawling, Wilson was looking like he needed help, so I left."
All things considered, Pete invading her privacy and going through her belongings was preferable to a showdown between him and Julia. She grabbed her dress off the bed where she'd laid it out before taking her shower and disappeared into the bathroom once again. After slipping into it and wrapping a towel around her wet hair, she felt better armed to face Pete.
When she re-entered the bedroom, he waved a flask of perfume at her. "This one," he said. "It's classy and sexy."
When she saw which bottle he was holding, she inhaled sharply. "No, I don't think so," she said. "I ... don't need 'sexy' tonight. I have to exude an aura of professional competence. The Dior should do the job."
He sniffed at the Dior. "Bo-o-o-ring," he judged.
"Not surprising; my mother gave it to me. But it's just right for a big formal do." She stretched out her hand for the perfume, but he pulled it away at the last moment, giving her a calculating glance.
"Why would you wear a standard, off-the-shelf perfume that reminds you of your mother, whom you hate, …"
"I don't hate my mother!"
"… when you have one smelling of a hundred dollars per ounce that suits you to a 't' ?" He picked up his original choice and stared at it, his chin jutting out in thought. Then right on cue, his gaze grew distant, marking one of his epiphanies. "Because the memories associated with this one are even worse." He tipped his head slightly, holding up the offending object and regarding it sideways. "I must have given you this one when we were dating."
She didn't attempt to deny it.
"How come you didn't trash it along with all the other mementos of me?" he asked.
There hadn't been much to trash; he had left astoundingly few tangible traces of his nine-month sojourn in her private life. His refusal to brand her house with the marks of his presence should have warned her of the impermanence of their relationship.
"I didn't wear it much after we broke up, but I kept it in the hope that someday I'd find one like it." She smiled at him pensively. "You're right: it does suit me."
His choices, whether in clothes, jewellery or perfumes, had always been unerring. When they were dating (an æon ago, in another life) he'd lie on the bed watching her get ready and proffering advice.
'Cuddy, it's a fundraiser!' he'd gripe. 'You wanna see money? Then you need to show some leg and a lot of cleavage. You can wear that straight-jacket to Christine's wedding, but not tonight.'
'Are you insinuating that the donors pay to see me half naked?'
'I'm suggesting that if you want them to dip into their wallets, you need to create positive associations in their subconscious. Your donors are mostly elderly guys; where are guys happy to spend money without getting anything material in return?" Short rhetoric pause. "In nightclubs. Wear the green dress and the silver pendant that hangs exactly between your boobs.'
Hoping to end the discussion, she took the Dior and dabbed it on her wrists and behind her ears.
"How do I sneak you past Julia?" she said, turning her back to him so that he could do up the zipper of her dress for her.
"You don't. You get Julia out of here, then I don't have to sneak anywhere." He got up and took hold of the zipper. "Breathe out and pull in your stomach! When was the last time you wore this dress?"
"About a year ago." How the hell was she supposed to keep her figure when she couldn't go for runs any more? It had taken months before she'd been able to do her full yoga routine again; going for five-mile runs was still a distant dream.
He inched the zipper up in minuscule steps. "You'll have to forego dinner. Not that I mind if the seams split, but I won't be there to enjoy the view."
Cuddy smirked at him in the mirror. "Yes, you will: you're coming with me, now that Wilson can't go. I'll send Julia down to Wilson so she can croon over Joel. That should keep her busy until you're out the door."
"You want me to go to that shindig even though I'm bound to run into your sister over there, if not here? Lisa, that's the crappiest idea you've had in a long time, and heaven knows there has been heavy competition lately."
"Julia is here to babysit Rachel, not to join in the applause when the guy who grabbed the deanship from under my nose explains how he's going to steer the hospital out of murky waters into the ocean of success."
She turned round to face him now that her zipper was done up, only to find him examining her intently. Oh shit, she'd just let him help her dress like he used to when they were still dating! She hadn't been thinking; she'd been on auto-pilot, trying to figure out how to prevent O.K. Corral from happening in her apartment. In order to hide her embarrassment she turned back to her dresser to choose a necklace.
"Chase will be there," she said, hoping this piece of information would make Pete amenable to attending the function.
"Why would Chase come to Philly Central's annual gala dinner now that you're back to swabbing crotches? Your new dean surely won't do him the favour of opening up a diagnostic department."
"Not our new dean; I'm going to open up a diagnostic unit," Cuddy said, not even trying to hide her satisfaction. "General Medicine has been shifted to my department to console me for losing out in the deanship stakes. The department is called Primary Care now, and I've been given the funding to employ a diagnostician."
"One diagnostician?" Pete mocked. "That's going to make so much of a difference!"
"That depends on the diagnostician," Cuddy said, twirling in front of the mirror in an attempt to get a glimpse of her ass in that dress. The dress was rather tighter than it should be, which didn't flatter her figure, but it would have to do for this evening. "If you want to get out of this bedroom before midnight, you're coming with me. Otherwise I'll make sure that Julia doesn't leave the apartment before I come back."
She'd thought she'd reached the pinnacle of humiliation when she'd lost the deanship to Ryan Andrews, but she'd aspire to new heights of mortification if she had to go without a date tonight after booking two seats at her table. All things considered, Pete was a better choice as a date than Wilson, because officially Wilson was her ex-fiancé. Pete's presence would take less explaining than Wilson's.
"I haven't got anything to wear," Pete groused.
"Yes, you do; you're attending that conference in Seattle, so you must have brought something." He'd have a suit and tie; it would have to do.
"If Julia's staying here with Rachel, then she can look after the rugrat too and Wilson can go with you," Pete suggested hopefully.
"Wilson isn't going to leave Joel with a stranger on his second night in his new home," Cuddy pointed out.
"Why not? It's not as though the little critter will notice the difference. Wilson is as much a stranger as Julia is. The kid has met him five times, making roughly ten hours in all, in his entire life. Besides," he said, tipping his head to the side to consider her choice of jewellery, "Julia is a female."
"Spare me whatever sexist drivel you're about to spout."
He raised his eyebrows as though insulted. "I'm merely saying that it takes several months for an infant's vision to develop fully, whereas hearing is fully developed after a month. Julia's voice is closer to Amy's than Wilson's, so the kid is more likely to take to her than to his dad. That isn't even taking into account that infants hear higher pitched voices better than lower ones."
She rolled her eyes. "You can try that argument on Wilson, but you should take into account that he has a third ear that hears neediness." After checking her appearance in the mirror she picked up the bedside phone. "I'd better do something about Julia before she comes in search of me."
She dialled Wilson's number. "Wilson, Julia's here and Pete is trapped in my bedroom. Could you come up and distract her, so I can smuggle Pete out of here?"
"And leave Joel alone?" he said.
"Bring him with you. Better still, take Julia down to your place. Oh, and would you bring Pete's conference get-up with you? He's accompanying me to the gala dinner."
Wilson choked. "What are you bribing him with? No, don't tell me, I'd rather not know."
She went out into the living room where Rachel was regaling her aunt with tales of the abandoned infant; both were only too happy to take up her suggestion that they should spend the evening helping Wilson to adapt to family life. When Wilson came upstairs, she grabbed the tote bag that he'd brought and quickly took it into her bedroom. "Get changed!" she mouthed before she shut the door on Pete again. Then she accompanied Julia and Rachel to the door of the apartment, shutting the door behind them and leaning against it with a sigh of relief.
"Where do you keep your sex toys?" Pete asked when she returned to the bedroom. He'd changed into a navy blue suit and a light blue shirt, and was now lying on her side of the bed with his hands clasped behind his head, surveying the bedroom with a contemplative frown. His gaze followed her involuntary one, and he smiled. "Top wardrobe shelf? Not exactly a prime location; you have to get up and climb on a chair whenever you're feeling frisky. Which makes sense if you're trying to punish yourself or if you never feel frisky or - if you're trying to keep a wheelchair-bound kid from playing with your toys."
Deciding to ignore him, she turned her back on him and sat down at the dresser to do her make-up. As she applied eye-liner, her eyes stared back at her, an ordinary grey with a few flecks of brown. What wouldn't she give to have Pete's eyes! Or Joel's.
Speaking of Joel ...
"You know," she said to Pete's reflection in the mirror, "it doesn't make any sense. Why would Amy think Wilson was manipulative or - what was it? - 'using emotional blackmail'? If she were accusing him of cashing in on her neediness in order to get her to sleep with him, I'd get it, but I'm pretty sure he didn't coerce or blackmail her into keeping Joel when she was pregnant. He wasn't all that enthusiastic at her refusal to terminate, not when he wasn't sure whether he'd survive his cancer or not." She picked up the mascara. "Now if it had been you …"
The pieces fell into place. She swung round from the dresser to face him directly. "It was you, wasn't it? You went to her telling her that she shouldn't terminate."
His silence was confirmation enough.
"How'd you do it?"
He shrugged. "Told her the truth: that a kid would give Wilson a reason to fight the cancer and that she'd be saving his life by keeping it. Nothing manipulative about that, is there?"
She didn't quite buy that, not when he was looking so determinedly innocent, but she decided to let it drop. "You're lucky she got pregnant from that one time and that she didn't terminate before you had a chance to 'persuade' her to keep Joel," she said, sketching quotation marks in the air.
"It was karma," he said, turning the palms of his hands outwards. "Besides, no matter what Wilson says, I doubt they slept together only once."
Karma, indeed! She returned her attention to her make-up, and for once Pete didn't distract her by making unsolicited comments or prying in her drawers, which gave her the opportunity to follow her own thoughts: Amy's behaviour had been vacillating even before she'd opted to abandon her child.
"You must have given the thumbscrews a good turn to change her mind like that. Before she knew about Wilson's cancer she even lied to Wilson about the pregnancy: she phoned and told him she wasn't pregnant. She must have wanted to terminate the pregnancy without having to argue the matter with him," Cuddy surmised, structuring her thoughts by voicing them. "To think that if Wilson had told you what she'd said about not being pregnant, it would never have occurred to you to pursue matters with her, and Wilson would be dead now!" She shook her head at so much providence.
When there was no reaction from the bed behind her, she swung around to check whether he'd fallen asleep. He was contemplating the toes of his shoes. (Was he really, seriously, wearing leather shoes? Miracles never ceased to happen.) His expression was pensive, expressing no appreciation whatsoever for the windfalls that had accompanied his dealings with Amy.
There was only one explanation for that: there had been no windfalls.
She got up slowly. "You knew about that?" It wasn't really a question. "So how did you know she was lying?"
"I got lucky," he said.
Lucky? "You don't believe in luck."
His eyes flickered over her face before they slid to a spot on the ceiling. He was hiding something, something big! When they'd worked together, whenever he'd bested the odds by circumventing rules and disregarding orders, he'd taunted her with it afterwards. His evasive silence now was more than uncharacteristic; it was unnerving.
For once, she had an epiphany. "She wasn't lying; she really wasn't pregnant," she said flatly. "Pete, what the fuck did you do?"
He scratched his eyebrow with a thumb nail. "Told her she'd be doing everyone a favour if she had Wilson's kid, handed her a cup of sperm and a turkey baster, and …"
"Pete, you didn't!"
His eyes finally met hers again. "Not the turkey baster - that would have been primitive, not state-of-the-art medical technology, so I took a syringe - but the rest was pretty much what happened."
"You - got her to get pregnant just so Wilson would opt for chemo? No wonder she feels manipulated!"
"She could have refused," Pete pointed out. "She wanted that kid. She wanted to get manipulated."
God, but he was irritating, lying on her bed for all the world as if he owned it, his shirt suggestively open at the collar, the navy blue of his suit accentuating the blue of his eyes. Blue … Something niggled at the back of her mind, but she couldn't place it.
"And how'd you get Wilson to donate a cup of his sperm? What story did you tell him?"
"Funny you should ask," Pete said, once more clasping his hands behind his head, "because Amy didn't."
There was a cold, heavy lump in Cuddy's stomach. Blue eyes. Bright blue eyes, even though both Wilson and Amy had brown ones. Yes, it was possible for an infant with two brown-eyed parents to have blue eyes - but the odds were against it. "It wasn't Wilson's sperm, was it? It was yours."
If she'd hoped he'd deny it, she was disappointed. "A cup of the Speciality of the House," he confirmed, looking cocky and quite unrepentant. "What does it matter? It did the job."
"You got her pregnant with your kid, pretending it was Wilson's, and you ask why it matters?" Her voice rose half an octave in pitch and about twenty decibels in volume. "What happens if Wilson does a paternity test? What would have happened if Amy had done so?"
"Relax, Lisa! Neither has as much as mentioned paternity tests. What does that tell you?" He paused rhetorically. "It tells you that they don't want to know. Wilson screws the woman a few times; she isn't pregnant - but then she is; the kid is born via Caesarean section two weeks after the due date, weighing a mere six pounds. Yet Wilson asks no questions."
She sat down at his feet, wondering what went on in that clever brain of his that he couldn't see how nefarious his deed was. "You're okay with Wilson raising your child?"
"Sure. Why shouldn't I be?" Pete raised his eyebrows, his head twitching mockingly. "Are you of all people insinuating that non-biological parents are not capable of giving their children a loving and nurturing environment?"
He was twisting her words, her very thoughts, before she uttered them. "No, and you know it! I'm saying that conceiving a child with the intention of dumping it on someone else for them to raise is callous towards the child and an act of treachery towards your friend."
He sighed as he sat up. "Lisa, millions of men sleep with women without protection, not caring whether they conceive a child, much less about how it will be raised. There's nothing 'unnatural' about it - that is human nature, to scatter your genes as widely as possible in the hope that one or the other of your offspring will survive. As for callousness towards the child, Wilson will make a great dad. Joel is going to grow up in a more stable environment than the majority of his peers."
"And if Amy had kept him?" she couldn't help interjecting.
His left cheek twitched in acknowledgment of her objection. "Amy was a bit of a cop-out as a mom, but that was not to be anticipated. She seemed good mother material; I couldn't know that she has no staying power. You win some, you lose some."
She massaged her forehead with her fingertips, wondering how to get through to him. "And if Wilson had died? Then Joel would now …"
"… be adopted by some career-driven, control-freakish single mom. How dreadful!"
She slapped his left leg lightly - she still instinctively went for his left leg, even though there was no reason to avoid his right one any longer.
"Ouch!" he cried out in fake hurt, before saying seriously, "Look, the most likely outcome would have been for Wilson to have married Amy and for the three of them to live happily ever after - until the inevitable divorce. Wasn't that what you were expecting until you were overtaken by yesterday's events?"
She had to concede the point, but she nevertheless made a last-ditch attempt to make him see reason. "If Joel looks more like you than like Wilson - and I bet he will! - then Wilson will figure it out sooner or later."
"What if he does? Perhaps he'll be mad at me, but he won't take it out on the brat. He stuck with me for years for no other reason than that he was my friend; he won't abandon a child who is dependent on him."
"And Joel? What happens when he figures out that Wilson isn't his father?"
For the first time he looked uncertain; his fingers tugged at her bedspread while he frowned out of the window. "You and Wilson will dish up the same tale that you've been feeding Rachel, namely that his adopted parent is better able to take care of his needs than his biological one - which in this case will actually be the truth." He leaned forward to clasp her wrist. "Lisa, you wanted Wilson alive. Everything comes at a price, life especially!" He let go again.
She shook her head to clear it. There was something intrinsically flawed in his logic, but she couldn't quite place her finger on it.
"Joel shouldn't have to pay that price," she said slowly. "We should. We're the ones who benefit; Wilson does, and so do I."
"Wilson is paying. And if you feel the need to assuage your useless and unwarranted guilt, don't hesitate. If you think Joel needs to be compensated for the slight irregularities surrounding his conception, then smother him in motherly affection!" He waited until she nodded in agreement, and then he swung his legs off the bed and pulled a tie from his pocket. "If you want to reach your gala dinner on time, we'll have to leg it."
She cast a glance at the bedside clock, another in the mirror, and suppressed a shriek. Her hair was still a mass of unruly curls, her make-up rudimentary at best, and she had a sum total of five minutes to do something about it.
It wasn't until the chairman of the board was into the twelfth minute of his speech extolling the new dean's virtues and expressing his hope for maximum gain to the hospital at minimum cost that she realised with a thud that she'd made the lousiest bargain of the almost fifty years of her life. She'd been manipulated into mothering Gregory House's offspring without managing to extract any sort of reciprocal benefit.